Wait... okay, hang on a minute. SPOILERS (for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., obviously, but also Avengers: Infinity War.)
Alright now. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. went and did it. No, not picking up on what happens after Thanos snaps his fingers. They pointedly (and rightly) did not do that. (And I'll pick up on that a bit later.) What they did do is write what felt quite definitively like a series finale. Faced with uncertainty about their renewal, given the choice to do a conventional cliffhanger anyway, or a more open-ended conclusion, the writers did right by their fans, and gave us actual ending. To everything. I'm in the weird position now of being a bit sad that the series actually was renewed for another season.
First, they wrapped up the Talbot storyline. A bit neatly and quickly perhaps, but they had a bigger agenda to get to with the characters. Daisy took a power-up booster shot and Quaked the bad guy so hard he was launched into space. Neat and quick, maybe... but also pretty damn satisfying and entertaining.
Far more important was how they gave all the main characters a compelling ending. Mack was recognized for his unwavering moral compass and put in charge of the entire team. Daisy made the right choice for the group here, but also very much the right choice for her -- keeping herself in the field as fully as possible. She also faced the loss of her biggest father figure straight on, doing what Coulson asked and using his one shot (literally) at recovery on herself, to save the world.
Yo-Yo had, appropriately, an up and down ride of emotions. She started at rock bottom, a Cassandra figure unable to convince anyone they were about to destroy the world. She got some consolation from Coulson, who told her he agreed with her. But she was still there at what could have been Coulson's final moment, to save his life for just a bit longer.
Fitz's story was the part that hit hardest. He'd been barreling down a dark course all season, and sure enough, there was a big consequence for that. He heroically tried doing the right thing at the end, but heroism got him killed. And for me, this loss strongly contrasted with the ending of Infinity War in terms of effectiveness -- though I'm sure some would argue it's fundamentally no different.
To me, it was. They sat in the moment of Fitz's death, very honestly, and made it believable. Only then did they let us off the hook, and then only by reminding us of a "loophole" already established -- somewhere floating in space is an earlier Fitz, in hibernation, trying to get to a future that now no longer exists. Even this "out" to save Fitz hardly undoes everything. If they ever find him (well, "when," since we now know the show will have another season), he'll have missed out on a great deal, not the least of which is his own wedding. He'll also still be full of the demons of his behavior in the Framework, without having had a way to purge them -- he'll be a ticking clock that needs to make different choices than the ones we've seen his doppelganger make.
What I especially love in this is that we only got the briefest taste of any anguish from Simmons. Just a few seconds of silent slow motion when she received the news of Fitz's death. She is, of course, a woman of science, and has always been the bright optimist. The moment she realized that a version of Fitz was still alive out there somewhere, she was not mournful, but hopeful. That hope is all they really showed us.
The most fitting ending of all, of course, was reserved for Coulson and May. It's impossible to imagine any better send-off for Coulson than finally, actually going to Tahiti to relax for the rest of his days. Well, other than for him to do that with someone who loves him dearly -- and he got that too. Sure, there's melancholy in the fact that they only have a few weeks together at most, but for two characters who've been in constant emotional torment all their lives (often self-inflicted), a few weeks is still a paradise. I frankly don't want them to find some last minute way to keep Coulson on the show for another season, as much as I love Clark Gregg's performance, because I feel like it could only undermine this perfect ending.
Hell, even Deke got a great ending. We never actually see him "wink out of existence." Fitz was proven wrong about the nature of time, so who's to say whether he got this part right? Did Deke disappear? Or is he out there in the open air, living a real life for the first time? Either ending works, and you're free to choose the one that works best for you.
So, the one thing we didn't get was that final connection to Infinity War. It turns out that all the talk of Thanos was not building to a particular reckoning in the finale, it was just motivation for Talbot's descent into darkness. And deciding not to show us any version of "half" the characters winking out of existence was absolutely the right choice for this, if it's a series finale. We got an end to this story, and it's left to us to imagine (if we want to) what happens to them in a post-Thanos universe. (But it being a show run by Whedons, that's not terribly hard to imagine. Either Coulson or May vanishes -- May would be the more wrenching choice. Simmons probably goes, to make it extra painful when they do find Fitz and revive him. Take Mack, since we've all just agreed he's the new core of the gang. Leave Yo-Yo and Daisy alive to work through their differences.)
I've really come to understand why I was so curious about what Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. would do post-Thanos, and it has nothing to do with the show itself. I was looking for them to save Infinity War for me. Among many complaints I have about that movie, the biggest was that I felt no weight to any of the deaths. I want to see people forced to live with real consequences of events. Yet it shouldn't be on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to provide that for me. They had nothing to do with that movie and no say in what happened there. Why should they clean up the mess? The first part of season one, remember, was a rocky treading of water until Captain America: Winter Soldier was released, killing off S.H.I.E.L.D. as an official organization, sending the TV characters underground, and essentially starting the "real" show. That wasn't great, so why wish something like it on them again?
It's been announced that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. won't be returning until next summer. By then Avengers 4 will have already wrapped up everything, leaving it to the series to decide to acknowledge what happened (or not) as they see fit. I still wish I could see some real, believable consequences from the events of Infinity War, but even more than that, I want Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to be its own thing. They already have their hands full anyway, needing to come up with a way to continue the show that doesn't undermine the integrity of the perfect series finale they just gave us.
Of course, I'll be there anyway when the show does come back. Quite nervously, though. But at least I've got more than a year to enjoy this grade A "conclusion."
No comments:
Post a Comment